Film Dayze

Yes I know, I haven’t written a blog post in a long time. The good thing about that is I have been so busy shooting fashion and celebrity assignments over the last few years, I haven’t been able to write much. To get the New Year going, here is a little story from when I first started out as an assistant.

I worked for Patrick Demarchelier for almost five years. And over the course of those years it was a myriad of learning, experiences and adventures. I wanted to make a quick entry to start off the year and explain the look behind this image of fashion beauty Cindy Crawford and how it was created.

First a little background on how we worked. I was fortunate enough to assist many iconic photographers when I was starting out. Each with their own looks, visions and modality. With that came a style. If I laid out a Richard Avedon photograph or a Bruce Weber photograph for example, you’d know who shot what the instant you looked at the images!

The interesting and exciting thing about working with Patrick is he would always have us (the assistants) experimenting with different films, filters and lighting. This certainly made Patrick a very versatile top fashion photographer. Yet all the while Demarchelier kept a few signature looks in his back pocket that were always unmistakably his “look.”

This Patrick Demarchelier image of Cindy for British Vogue was created in Ladakh/India when she was about 20 years old (circa 1985) as best my memory can serve. We used Scotch ISO 1000 film for the beautiful warm tones and the high ISO grain structure. And yes Scotch as in the tape, made film!